Category: Latest

This is the third iteration of the Bruce and Luke’s Handcrafted coffee website.
It will not be the last.

The internet, and all it’s associated technologies move and evolve so quickly that your website can be out of date within a year or two, however done right, this isn’t a problem. I only use WordPress for my websites now unless I really have to use something else, and this is because it is so versatile and if you do everything right at the start, that base can carry you along for many many years. All you need to do is refresh the look and feel of the website, the content and data within the website can stay the same. This is ideal for people like Bruce and Luke who had an e-commerce shop with rolling subscriptions as it meant that the service was uninterrupted.

The benefit of using a CRM like WordPress is that any decent web developer can look at your website and get to grips with it relatively quickly*, and it is by far the best supported platform on the web (I have spent the last decade trying everything available, so it’s a fairly educated opinion, but still an opinion non the less).

Bruce and Luke came to my office here in Carlisle, and said “we want to up our online game”. So as I previously mentioned, this would be iteration 3, optimising from everything we’d learnt.

Iteration 1: I put together a quick website and bought a theme (if you want advice on themes get in touch, some can be more hassle than they are worth! ) just to get something online, at this point, the lads hadn’t much interest in pushing things online, as they were focussing on getting their roasting process perfected. Phase: Get online

Iteration 2: Processes in place they came back and wanted online subscriptions and a new look website. At this point the transition was easy because there was no real data worth saving from iteration 1, so we started again, we bought another theme and then I gave Luke a few weeks of tutoring on the do’s and don’ts of websites and editing things in WordPress, and then he came back with a website fully loaded with content and products ready to sell (and a lot of broken bits, but he saved a big chunk of budget by doing the majority of the content editing himself, then coming to me to fix the bits he broke). The subscriptions proved a success but they noticed that they were getting a lot of enquiries about their machines, which this version of the website had not focussed on. Phase: Learn how it works for you

Iteration 3: We started from the ground up, we wanted to sell to consumers like you and me at home, sell coffee to cafes, and then also sell machines to other businesses. Running a cafe is where their skills lay, so selling machines came from a very well informed background, and we wanted to utilise this online. So we had the brief, and they came to me with a good brief knowing what they wanted and how they wanted to achieve it. Phase: Optimise!

I sat with Luke on a regular basis as we built the site up to match what he had in his head, it all started to come together. One of the things we really focussed on was making sure that we provided only the content that was needed at the right time as so many websites clutter up the user experience and just generally make it difficult for the user to figure out the next steps on the website.

Along with the clean looking theme, the other aspect was to integrate with all the tools to help them track and manage their users in terms of customer experience, so we developed forms for every different option, we then integrated that with CRMs and mailing lists so that they can provide the right data to the people that are interested.

The end results have come out fantastic, and have received a high amount of praise from their existing and new customers, and have already taken requests for top end coffee machines.

One of my favourite things to take away from this job is that by working with Bruce and Luke, they have completely upped their online game. They have put the time and effort in to learn how everything works and the dynamics of the internet as a sales and interaction platform, they came to me with questions that I couldn’t answer on a regular basis, so not only was I teaching them the ways of the force online, they were pushing me to my limits and kept me learning.

*This is not always the case, sometimes when previous developers cut corners and try to do a “cheap” job, it ends up leaving long term management of the website an absolute nightmare, so my advice to you if you’re looking for prices for a WordPress site, don’t assume you’re getting the best deal just because it’s the cheapest deal. You will end up paying more in the long run, and at a time when you can’t control it.

Before and After

One of our clients, is Wall Glamour, and one of our favourite products of theirs is the giant wall mural.

After looking at pictures of them for so long we decided it was time to bite the bullet and get one of our own in the new office. Using a photo from the talented Scotty Stephenson (Check out all of his other work when you get a spare moment), and having Rick come and fit it for us, the transformation is astounding… see for yourself… and if you’re in Carlisle City centre at any point, come in for a cuppa and see it for real.